Thomas Szasz

Dr. Thomas Szasz wasn’t a popular figure in his chosen specialty of psychiatry, in part because he denounced his colleagues as little more than quacks and questioned whether the disorders they were diagnosing even existed. Indeed, Szasz’s controversial 1961 book, The Myth of Mental Illness, contained the mental health equivalent of the 95 Theses that Martin Luther nailed to a church door in Wittenberg. Szasz, who died on Sept. 8 at age 92 at his home near Syracuse, N.Y., charged that there …